DATE: Sunday, July 20, 1997                 TAG: 9707200069

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A17  EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: THE WASHINGTON POST 

DATELINE: SEVEN-HUNDRED FEET UNDERWATER, OFF THE COAST OF CAPE CANAVERAL  LENGTH

linesNAVY TOUTS ITS SEAWOLF, BUT DEFENDS NEED FOR NEW SUB PROGRAM

Standing in near darkness lit only by a bank of flickering computer screens, Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer Jeff Rowe searched for words of praise for the high-tech sonar gear he oversees aboard the new Seawolf attack submarine. From miles away, the sonar lets Rowe distinguish between the chatter of dolphins, a fishing trawler's propeller and the engine of a Russian Akula sub, he said.

``This is an incredible system, and although a lot of people complain about the cost of a Seawolf, I think it's worth every penny,'' said Rowe, one of 138 crew members assigned to the first Seawolf sub, which will enter Navy service later this month. ``Now if we could just find somebody to fight with it.''

It is a good summary of the Navy's quandary as it commissioned its first Seawolf submarine Saturday at a Connecticut shipyard.

The Navy says the Seawolf is ``the world's fastest, quietest submarine,'' and many analysts believe it is the most effective attack submarine ever built, a sub capable of performing many missions. But how, the Navy wonders, can it rhapsodize about a $2.4 billion anti-ship weapon that lost its military purpose with the Berlin Wall's fall, and that even its sponsors say was needed mostly to save U.S. jobs?

Military critics think the Seawolf was discredited long ago, and scoff at Navy efforts to promote it.

``The Seawolf submarine was outrageously expensive and unnecessary,'' said retired Rear Adm. Eugene Carroll, deputy director of the Center for Defense Information. ``It is a scandal that ought to embarrass everybody. You can't market it.''

Navy officials will tiptoe around these topics in honoring the Seawolf later this month at the Electric Boat shipyard in Groton, Conn.

But the Navy's real agenda is not justifying the Seawolf. It is talking up the need for yet a newer class of undersea boats, called the New Attack Submarine. The 30 or so new subs are estimated to cost about $60 billion, including a $3 billion down payment in the fiscal 1998 budget now before Congress.

The Seawolf's commander, Capt. David McCall, said his crew understands its performance will help determine whether the Navy submarine community gets the money it wants for the new sub, or loses to arch-rivals - those promoting surface ships, naval aviation, Air Force jets, Army tanks and more.

``The stakes are not lost on this crew,'' McCall said last week from the Seawolf's ``attack center,'' where torpedoes are launched with the touch of a computer screen. ``We believe submarines are the most cost-effective platform for U.S. power projection.''

But McCall waves off questions about Seawolf's controversial past.

In the 1980s, the Navy planned to build 30 Seawolf-class nuclear subs to replace Los Angeles-class subs. In the Cold War, attack submarines were designed to elude Soviet subs while hunting them down in the depths - from the Caribbean to beneath the polar ice cap. Their long struggle was over which navy could build subs with quieter engines and more sophisticated sensors to spot the enemy.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, the underwater cat-and-mouse games were called off. In 1992, President George Bush canceled the last 29 Seawolves, declaring them overqualified for the post-Cold War job and too expensive. He decided that only this sub now entering service should be built.

But the Defense Department pushed to build more Seawolves. It said stopping all sub work until the New Attack Submarine program begins, around 1999, could cripple the Electric Boat shipyard. That would scatter thousands of engineers and welders trained in the arcane arts of sub design and fabrication, costing taxpayers billions of dollars to reconstitute the yard when the New Attack Sub program begins.

Citing the need to preserve the nation's submarine industrial base, Congress decided to build two more Seawolf subs than Bush had ordered despite a Pentagon acknowledgment that it could not justify additional Seawolf subs militarily.

Despite that, the Navy is pressing ahead to launch the New Attack Sub program, which it says is necessary because its 1970s-era Los Angeles-class subs are approaching retirement age. Navy officials said the United States still needs undersea weapons for what it calls ``multimission'' operations. These include attacking enemy ships, covert electronic intelligence-gathering from offshore, dropping spies and Navy commandos onto foreign beaches, and laying and detecting undersea mines. The Navy has carried out such missions, in ``littoral'' or ``brown'' water near land, in the past. But they are a far cry from the better-known mission assigned to Navy subs during the Cold War, chasing Soviet submarines in the deep ``blue water'' ocean.

But the Navy has a public relations problem promoting the new subs it wants. ``Multimission'' operations are highly classified and, besides describing them generally, Navy officials provide no details. ``The Navy can't give specifics about what subs do because so many sub operations are sensitive,'' said Ronald O'Rourke, a Congressional Research Service analyst of Navy budgets. ``It puts the sub community at a PR disadvantage. . . . But the fact is the U.S. will get good use out of the three Seawolves, performing these other missions.''

O'Rourke supports the Navy's contention that U.S. subs always performed these tasks, and says the brass did not invent the missions recently to justify new sub budgets.

Navy officials say the New Attack Submarine, at $1.7 billion a copy, or two-thirds the price of this Seawolf, will be a bargain. ``The New Attack Sub will be able to do most things Seawolf can do, but be built on a budget,'' McCall said.

This, then, was the real purpose of reporters' recent day-long tour of the Seawolf - the admirals hope it makes the case for the New Attack Subs that will incorporate the Seawolf's technological marvels.

And the Seawolf has impressed sub aficionados. To maintain stealth, every structure within it was designed to minimize sound and vibration. A Seawolf is regarded as quieter cutting the waves at 25 knots than is a current Los Angeles-class sub tied up at pier. To ensure the clanging of a dropped wrench does not travel through the water, the Seawolf's inner decks rest on rubber mountings.

The boat's communications and electronics, enabled by 6 million lines of software code, are by far the most advanced of any sub's. Stripped of its weapons, the Seawolf is essentially a massive computer stuffed inside a 9,000-ton cigar-shaped tube.

``It's like comparing a modern jet fighter to a propeller aircraft,'' McCall said. ``I can do more things (with the computer terminal) in my stateroom than I could from the control room of my last sub.''

The Navy also argues it needs Seawolves and New Attack Submarines to counter the ever-more capable Russian-built Akula and Severodvinsk subs. Russia sells these vessels to countries such as China and Iran - a point mentioned repeatedly in Navy literature promoting the U.S. submarine program.

Navy critic Carroll is unconvinced.

``When I hear them try to describe China or Iran as naval superpowers we need to fear, I gag,'' he said. ``There's no military requirement for new U.S. attack submarines in the foreseeable future.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo

ASSOCIATED PRESS

The Seawolf, the nation's latest nuclear attack submarine, was

commissioned Saturday in Groton, Conn. Critics scoff at the Navy's

promotions for the sub, saying that with the end of the Cold War,

its prime purpose no longer exists.

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